I was interviewed for the Software Misadventures Podcast.
Below is a machine generated transcription.
[0:00] Adam: I don’t know why I wanted to be the best engineer. But like, there’s all these people that I looked up to in that time, like Joel Spolsky. Um, like I want to be that great.
[0:06] Adam: But like, if you think about it, the reason we know about them is because actually they’re communicators, right? They’re explaining problems to us.
[0:12] Adam: Like, I thought this guy has a blog because he’s the most amazing engineer.
[0:18] Adam: Um, but no, he, he, I know about the things that he’s done because he talks about them, right? Like all these people I looked up to, what they’re actually good at was communicating, right?
[0:29] Adam: The person who wrote the book that I wanted to ask questions about how to do functional programming, like, it’s not clear they were the best functional programmer in the world. Hopefully they were decent at it, but no, they had written a book, right? They had spent a lot of time communicating.
[0:40] Adam: So I think that actually, I maybe realized that my goal was misplaced, that there was a larger goal or something that, yeah, I wasn’t seeing that all these people who communicate are the people that I look up to, right.
[0:56] Adam: And it’s, it can be super impactful if you can take something and explain it in a way that lets it crystallize in people’s minds.
[1:03] Adam: And I don’t know that I’m the best at it, but it feels very valuable and important.
[1:23] Ronak or Guang: Welcome to the Software Misadventures Podcast. We are your Ronak or Guangs, Ronak and Guan.
[1:28] Ronak or Guang: As engineers, we are interested in not just the technologies, but the people and the stories behind them.
[1:34] Ronak or Guang: So on this show, we try to scratch our own edge by sitting down with engineers, founders, and investors to chat about their path, lessons they’ve learned, and of course, the misadventures along the way.
[1:42] Ronak or Guang: Awesome to have you here, Adam.
[1:48] Ronak or Guang: You’re the Ronak or Guang of the CoRecursive podcast. Before our conversation, you were telling us a little about your background and I love sort of the arc that you gave, the focus being the value of communication and then how you were able to get there, the different steps in your career.
[2:03] Ronak or Guang: So I thought maybe interesting place to start is going back to when you were first getting started as an engineer, like, was there different points where you specifically recognize it’s like, “Oh, wow, communication is something that’s quite powerful, but that’s very under leveraged by like your peers.”
[2:20] Adam: So I used to work at this place here in Peterborough called Operatel, made a lot of friends there. And I think, like, I just really wanted to be really good coder, I guess, you know, and they had like a large complicated code base.
[2:35] Adam: People were always adding, it was like enterprise software. People are adding features as fast as they could. And like, nobody could keep track of any of it.
[2:48] Adam: And like, I just wanted to get really good at that. Right. Like, “Oh, you want to be the guy that they go to when something’s on fire?” Because you know all the stuff, right. And there was people who knew all the stuff. And I’m like, I want to be one of those people.
[3:00] Adam: So that was very important to me. I don’t think I thought communication was important. I just wanted to have this great skill set, right? And develop it.
[3:08] Adam: And then, I ended up transitioning from there to working someplace remote. So it was actually a weird thing where my boss had left, I liked him, and he was interviewing for this other role, but it was in another city. And he’s like, “Yeah, you could do it remote, like from home.”
[3:26] Adam: And I was like, that sounds awesome. It turned out the company was like less on point with me being remote than he was. But I didn’t end up taking it, even though it was like iffy whether I would have to move to Kitchener, for instance.
[3:40] Adam: But I liked working from home. But I missed some of the stuff from Opertel, you know, and like it wasn’t, you said communication. That’s like a big word. It makes me think of like writing up documentation for something.
[3:54] Adam: Right. But like, what I missed was like being in the cafeteria, like we had this cafeteria and you know, you’re like having lunch or waiting for the free microwave or whatever, and you know somebody’s telling some story about something, server was down last night and like and I got called in and then somebody’s like, “Oh did you did you check was it the you know was the disk full” and they’re like “Oh I thought it was the disk full but it wasn’t the disk full” and like “Oh was it the whatever.”
[4:23] Adam: This was a Windows server. So it was like, “Was IIS like leaking memory or something?” And anyways, people like go back and forth through it. And it’s like a fun game and you’re like trying to figure out.
[4:30] Adam: And the guy’s like, “No, no, it turned out it wasn’t at all. Like somebody had pointed something to the wrong server and blah, blah, blah.”
[4:38] Adam: There was always these stories. Probably because people were moving too fast and things were always blowing up, but like a lot of the knowledge about how to solve problems, about how things work there, right? It was actually transferred just in people like, you know, like shooting the breeze in this cafeteria setting.
[4:54] Adam: And like, I didn’t get that right once I started working remote. So that was my first inkling. I think that like, “Oh, this is something important, right?”
[5:00] Adam: Nobody says like, “Oh, you know, we would like to give you a raise because people have learned a lot from those crazy stories you tell at lunch.” But like, it turns out that that’s very important. And it’s like a thing where people get a lot, like people talk about mentoring. Like a lot of it is right there in these like casual venues.
[5:16] Adam: So that was my first inkling that like, this is something important.
[5:23] Ronak or Guang: Interesting. And fast forward a little bit. So you mentioned that you’ve gotten to management and then later on DevRel, like how did that sort of experience evolve into something where you’re like, “Okay, there’s a strategic point to it” rather than just something that’s very makes the job more fulfilling?
[5:42] Adam: There’s like 30 steps, but like, I guess that’s the problem.
[5:48] Adam: But like, yeah, so I started working remotely. I worked on this team, really smart people, some of the smartest people I’ve worked with before, and we weren’t always actually accomplishing as much as I thought we should.
[6:00] Adam: It’s like, you know, sometimes you wish you’re like, “Man, wouldn’t it be great if the whole team was rock stars.” Like you imagine there’s these 10X developers out there and be so amazing. Or maybe you just imagine like, you didn’t have that guy who you keep having to walk them through things.
[6:19] Adam: That wasn’t me, that’s why I raised my hand. I mean, everybody’s that guy sometimes, but like the team was very skilled, but we weren’t getting as much done as I thought, like it just didn’t seem to be working.
[6:28] Adam: And so that was my entry point to becoming an engineering manager. Cause I thought like the problem here isn’t technical skills. Like all of the people on this team are super talented. So something else is the problem, right?
[6:39] Adam: So that transitioned me to being an engineering manager, and then eight more steps. And then I ended up in developer relations.
[6:46] Ronak or Guang: So I wanted to fast forward a little bit and talk a little bit more about podcasting. So, before I think you started CoRecursive, you were a podcast Ronak or Guang at SE Radio, software engineering radio for folks who might not know. I think IEEE actually managed this podcast.
[7:08] Adam: There was this podcast called Software Engineering Daily. And Jeff, who was the Ronak or Guang, he made an episode for a long time every weekday. And that was a lot.
[7:22] Adam: So anyways, I was listening to one of his episodes and he said, “I need some people to help me do this.” Right. So I reached out to him and like he said, “Yeah, like just find somebody and interview them.” And like “Send me the WAV file or whatever,” like there was very little tutelage involved.
[7:38] Adam: Yeah, vetting almost. So that was, that was my entry point. And then like he, after a while, I think he took on a couple of people like this and he was like, “This is unwieldy. I’m going to stop doing it.” But then he recommended me to the Software Engineering Radio.
[7:49] Adam: And they’re based out of the IEEE. He had started there. They had more structure. And that’s how I got into it.
[8:00] Adam: But I mean, the motivation was like, I was still in that world where I was like, “I just want to be the best programmer. Like I want to know everything and be able to tackle all these problems.”
[8:07] Adam: And I was at this point, like I was a Scala developer and I was getting deep into like functional programming and there’s like a million things to learn. And it’s like, it’s just, it seems like vast.
[8:26] Adam: Right. And so it was like an opportunity for me to just talk to these experts and ask them questions. Right. It was like, “I have a question about this thing. This guy wrote this book. Like I can just talk to him and ask him questions.”
[8:31] Ronak or Guang: Nice. So like at some point you decided to start CoRecursive. What made you make that jump? Because SE Radio was kind of doing a lot of the hard work that goes into podcasting and has a good name behind it. Then why make the change?
[8:50] Adam: So, I was doing these episodes for Jeff, the Software Engineering Daily, and I was reaching out to people to interview them. And I didn’t really run it by him. I just started booking more interviews and some of them I booked far out.
[8:57] Adam: And then one time I sent him a thing, like an episode I recorded it. And he’s like, “Okay, well, we stopped doing that.” And I still have more interviews booked. So it was like, “I guess I’m starting my own podcast.” Like I already have interviews scheduled.
[9:09] Adam: Oh, wow.
[9:18] Adam: First interview that I did where I was like, “Okay, so I said I was interviewing for this podcast. Like actually you’re being interviewed for as yet unnamed podcast that I just made up.”
[9:24] Adam: Uh, yeah, but people didn’t seem to care. And I remember talking to Jeff when I told him I was doing this, I was like, “Okay, well, like I booked these couple of first episodes of my podcast, saying it was yours, because I mean, accidentally, like, how do I book for other people?”
[9:34] Adam: And he was like, “People like to talk about themselves. I wouldn’t worry about it. Like, he’s just like, just email people, right?”
[9:42] Adam: I’m sure you guys have noticed, like, it’s actually not that hard. I’ve been surprised by just how kind, I guess, like fancy or like famous people are.
[9:55] Adam: Their time, because I think that’s the thing I worry about the most, right? It’s like they have this busy schedule, you know, all these things, talking to some random dudes from the internet seems to be low on the priority list, but yeah, if you’re pretty clear about the messaging, to show that you’ve done your homework, that definitely helps.
[10:10] Ronak or Guang: I’m curious, like, in those first days what were, for, for us, I think it was the, the writing the emails. I think that was the most painful to, you know, to actually do. So it’s kind of funny to hear that for you. It’s like, you’ve already probably have a process at that point, right? If you already booked, you know, quite a few. Well, what was the hardest part about the early days of starting the podcast?
[10:34] Adam: That’s a good question. Definitely reaching out to people feels fraught, right? Like you feel like you’re putting yourself out there.
[10:39] Adam: And I was looking at your episodes. Like, I know that there’s people in that list that I have reached out to in the early days who said no. Right. And maybe they would say yes now, but I’m never going to reach back out to them. It’s just like, you feel, you feel rejected, you know.
[11:00] Adam: Like it’s not… Go ahead, go ahead.
[11:05] Adam: I’m sensitive to, right? Like probably somebody is just like, “No, I’m busy. I can’t do this.” Right. But my perception is like, “Oh yeah. They looked deep into my soul and said that I’m not worthy, right?”
[11:12] Ronak or Guang: It’s like, that’s that’s so real. And it’s super funny because, Ronek and I actually, we had an incident where he’s someone that we reached out to like maybe two years ago, and then they said, “No, now’s not the good time.” But then they actually came on the show because I didn’t realize he wrote the email like two years ago.
[11:34] Ronak or Guang: So then I was just like, “Oh, this person seems pretty cool. Like, let me just write the email.” So that was a pretty funny moment.
[11:41] Adam: I remember, uh, as Charity Majors, I was trying to figure out reaching out to people. And so I read some articles about it by some marketers or whatever.
[11:46] Adam: I don’t know, like, don’t look for advice on like how to cold outreach to people. Like it’s really, it’s good.
[11:53] Ronak or Guang: Yeah. Oh, no, it’s terrible. They do almost nothing that people say on the recommended like, “Oh, there’s these things and they’ll…”
[12:00] Ronak or Guang: Like, basically, like, set up a chain of emails where you reach out to them and then you follow up and then you follow up. Right.
[12:06] Adam: And so I found some tool. It’s like, so I wrote the email to Charity and then like three days later, it would send a follow up if she hadn’t responded. And there’s like three of those.
[12:16] Adam: And so I emailed her, like I set up the thing and I sent it to her. And she emailed me like, back like 60 seconds later and she’s like, “Yeah, sure.”
[12:23] Adam: But like, “What’s going on with all these emails?” And they had all sent at once. So I’d sent, “Yeah, I really want you on the podcast.” I sent her like, “Oh, would you like to be on the podcast.” And then like, “Oh, you haven’t come back to me. No, you still haven’t come back to me.”
[12:36] Ronak or Guang: Years.
[12:42] Adam: Yeah. So that’s how fast I iterate, you know, it’s on the order of like, within 60 seconds. So maybe that’s the, that’s the method.
[12:55] Ronak or Guang: So, one question on the follow up. This is something that I struggled with a lot. When it comes to writing an email to reach out to a guest, one part is you want to do some research to write a thoughtful email instead of a random cold email, which I think is okay. Like there’s a way to do that.
[13:08] Ronak or Guang: But then on the follow up, at least I feel a lot of friction in doing that follow up. And I have Guang here pinging me almost every three days. “Did you follow up yet?” And I don’t have one of the tools that you mentioned.
[13:17] Ronak or Guang: And when I say there is friction, for me, that friction comes from not knowing exactly the language to use to follow up. There are certain templates that I use, but then, for whatever reason, I get bored and I don’t like them anymore. And then I’ll go to ChatGPT and waste 15 minutes just to craft like one line followup.
[13:37] Ronak or Guang: I’m curious. Is there a language that you figured out that you used in follow up emails that just makes it much easier to do that?
[13:44] Adam: I guess the answer is no. Like, I, it’s funny cause, cause like Guang, you had to follow up with me for this just because I, I don’t know. There’s a lot of emails and I forgot. I was like, “I’m going to respond to that.” And then I didn’t.
[14:03] Ronak or Guang: Yeah. I did like a little retrospective on like just like the power of like following up. I think I really learned it when I was doing like the third insight bootcamp to like, to try to do like a VC funded company.
[14:10] Ronak or Guang: One of the advisors, so Yuri who used to work at YC, he was like, “Yeah, you got to set it up, you know, six follow ups.” I was like, “Six? Like, are you kidding me? Like, I would like, I would definitely report spam.”
[14:26] Ronak or Guang: Like, so then I think we kind of settled, like, like who on earth? But then that was also kind of drilled into my head, but then he was until much later when like, I think I saw Jake doing this.
[14:38] Ronak or Guang: So he’s the founder of, uh, of Insight and then he just wrote like very casually say kind of like “Hey, just quick pinging, you know, in case email got buried.”
[14:43] Ronak or Guang: And then he says “If not, it’s not the best time like no worries.” Like that line to me was like magic because he just like absolved me from all the guilt, because I felt so bad for like I feel like I’m like begging for like, “Oh, can you please like, you know, do this thing? Can you please like take a look?”
[15:03] Ronak or Guang: And then that really changed the equation to more like, “Hey, I’m trying to find like a match, right? To see if there’s like value that we can provide and if that’s something that you’re interested.”
[15:15] Ronak or Guang: So it’s kind of like, okay, it’s more like equal instead of like, I’m trying to, you know, get stuff from you. Um, so yeah, so now I’m not much less scared about doing it.
[15:21] Adam: Yeah. I have this thing. Okay. I want. One second. followupthen.com. All it is, followupthen has a whole bunch of email accounts that you add to your contact list.
[15:32] Adam: And so when I messaged somebody, I’ll just, I’ll just write them a message and then I’ll BCC like two weeks at followupthen.com, and it just emails me the email back two weeks later. So it’s like, that’s my system now.
[15:44] Adam: I don’t have any. So you don’t, you keep track of it. That way you can do the follow up or if you can check to see if you still want to follow up.
[15:50] Adam: So it just puts it back to the top of my email box and then I’m like, “Okay, yeah.” Like, and I agree, like saying like, “Yeah, no worries if it’s not a fit” or whatever makes it feel, I don’t know, less on the line, I guess, right?
[16:09] Ronak or Guang: So I was reviewing CoRecursive’s profile on Apple podcasts, and there are a bunch of good reviews about your storytelling. People like “Every story feels very unique. It’s very engaging” and things like that, which is pretty amazing.
[16:25] Ronak or Guang: So I’m curious, like, how did you figure out what sort of storytelling mechanism you want to use in the podcast? And how do you now go about structuring the episode? This is mostly me trying to learn.
[16:31] Adam: So Software Engineering Radio is very technical and like dry, I would say. And they have like a very strong format. It’s like, let’s interview somebody about the cap theorem.
[16:42] Adam: Right. And then it’s like, you have to have like an outline prepared and you have to show that this person’s an expert. And then you can go through like, “Oh, what are the, the trade offs of, of this versus that?” And it’s very dry.
[16:53] Adam: You can learn a lot, I guess. But as I was doing it, and then kind of repeating it on my own, talking to people for CoRecursive, like, I found like the parts that spoke to me were not that, right?
[17:04] Adam: Like, the parts that stood out to me talking to people was when people shared things, right? We go back to what I was saying at the cafeteria at Obertell, and, you know, they’re explaining like, “Oh, the server was down and how do we look into it?” And like, that stuff was so much more compelling to me. And I just wanted to do more of that.
[17:25] Adam: The last interview I did for, for Software Engineering Radio was, uh, Stephen Wolfram. I was talking to him about his you know, his programming language and all the things he’s built, but then I forget what we started talking about.
[17:37] Adam: Like if he could estimate, you know, something to do with like how much he weighed based on his calories or something. And he’s like, coding and his language and trying to figure out how much he weighs. And it was just like us having fun, like using his Wolfram Mathematica and stuff.
[17:55] Adam: And, and I was like, this is better, right? It’s like just an experience rather than him explaining the trade offs of various things. They, they cut it from the episode. Like they got rid of it all.
[18:04] Ronak or Guang: Yeah. Wow!
[18:09] Adam: And he was, I forget what we were coming up with, but it was like, I was throwing problems at him and he was going to calculate them. And I was like, “Oh, I’m in Peterborough.” And he’s like, “Peterborough, UK.” I’m like, “No, Peterborough, Canada.”
[18:16] Adam: And he’s like, Mathematica is like his baby. And it’s like, he was like the Tom Cruise in Minority Report. Like, he was, like pulling the data from various places. And I was like, “This is awesome.” But yeah, they didn’t feel that was like educational.
[18:29] Adam: But the point is, I was like, this is the good stuff, right? Just like lean into the actual experiences that people have.
[18:41] Adam: Yeah. So the, I don’t, I don’t have a quick answer for like how you do that, but like pay attention to what you find interesting. Right. And like double down on that, I think is the key.
[18:47] Ronak or Guang: That was, that must’ve been super interesting, weird experience, right? Being like, “Oh, I think I got this really golden nuggets, but having that cut out,” like, how do you work with the editor? Like in that process, like, do they kind of come up with like, “Hey, you know, the outline that you mentioned, it’s like, we need to hit these things.” And then do you get much say in terms of…
[19:02] Adam: So at Software Engineering Radio, they. Robert, who runs it, he has a very in depth process, like the manual that he made for it is online.
[19:15] Adam: And, uh, actually, like, I don’t think he’s wrong about cutting it because the way that that podcast worked was always, like, about the technical details, right? It wasn’t like, “Oh, let’s have some fun with Stephen Wolfram,” right?
[19:29] Adam: It was like, “Tell me about Mathematica and like, what’s the history of it? And what, you know, how would you parse it and whatever the details are.”
[19:35] Adam: But so their process was you’d come up with an outline in a Google doc, the editors and the other Ronak or Guangs would review it, offer feedback, and then you record the episode and then you can provide a list of edits. If you’re like, “Oh, you know, we need to cut out this one part.”
[19:50] Adam: You would just give like timestamps. And then they kind of took it from there. And usually they just went with whatever you had.
[19:57] Adam: But my interview with Steven was long because we were just like messing around. And so I guess he wanted to cut some stuff out and he’s like, “Yeah, let’s get rid of this, like playing around. Like, what’s the fun of that?”
[20:17] Ronak or Guang: So Ron, I mentioned this as well. And, you know, you, so you started out CoRecursive back in 2018 being pretty technical, like you said coming off like Software Engineering Daily. And now it’s, you know, it’s very like storytelling driven, right?
[20:32] Ronak or Guang: I think you mentioned that the raw interviews can be like up to 2 hours. Right. Versus like the final product, right? Cause it’s like only maybe like 40, 50 minutes. So there’s a ton of like editing, you know, you’re thinking about the story.
[20:39] Ronak or Guang: So it’s super different now. And then like, were there any like pivotal moments in that journey, in this like evolution of the podcast that you like that comes to mind?
[20:50] Adam: So, yes, but many, I guess. So the other day I get all these emails from people who like, want their… Almost always Bitcoin startups, uh, but like varying things to like be a guest on the podcast, right?
[21:04] Adam: Somebody reached out. Wasn’t, like a blockchain thing, but they’re like, “Oh, you should talk to this, to our CEO, whatever.” It was like sort of interesting. You know, they’re like, “Oh, Ron can talk about our new release.”
[21:24] Adam: And we have a new feature flag on the settings page. I was trying to explain to them, like, “No, that’s not what I need. Like, does he have an interesting story?” And they’re like, “Oh, he’s got tons of stories.” Right.
[21:31] Adam: Uh, and so like we had some back and forths, but there was like a gem of stuff where I was interested. And so we, we got on a zoom call to talk it out. Right. And I was telling this person, this is what I learned. And I tried to, I tried to to give it to them. Right.
[21:49] Adam: So this is a story. I am here in Peterborough a couple months ago. I’m, I’m driving to, to see my wife at her work. And I’m almost at her work and I’m at a stoplight and there’s like several cars in front of me and I have to pick her up.
[22:04] Adam: Then, you know, the light turns green, the car in front of me goes, and then like this guy runs out in front of my car and he’s on crutches. Right? And he doesn’t look well, but not in like the injured way, but in the like, “I’ve been living a rough life” type of way.
[22:16] Adam: And he’s like screaming, right? Just like screaming, not at me, but like off in some other direction. And then I see what he’s screaming about and there’s another guy in a wheelchair.
[22:28] Adam: That he’s screaming at and they’re screaming back and forth and the guy in the wheelchair like first of all I just want to go, like I want to drive, I can see my wife’s work because it’s like on the corner but like this guy’s standing in front of me like having the screaming match.
[22:40] Adam: No way, I don’t want to catch his attention, right? But like I also want to get by him and then the guy in the wheelchair is like wheeling right? And he like builds up speed and he actually smashes into the guy on the crutches and knocks him down.
[22:52] Adam: The crutches are on the ground and like I’m still there like I still I’m like, “I’m gonna be late to pick up Courtney, my wife, I’m probably not that late but like I don’t want to anger her like I borrowed her car” and blah blah blah.
[23:06] Adam: And then the guy with the crutches like gets up and I’m like, “Oh, good, he’s gonna get out of the way.” But he takes his crutch like a baseball bat and he goes at the guy in the wheelchair and like smashes across them and they’re just like fighting like out in the middle of the street, right.
[23:22] Adam: So I say to this lady like “That is a story,” right? Like I’m the protagonist right, and I’m trying to get to my wife’s work, right? That’s my objective and then there’s obstacles like the obstacle, these guys like a guy in a wheelchair and a guy…
[23:34] Adam: They ended up being fine like they both… Like, I don’t think the wheelchair guy was a paraplegic because he kind of jumped, like, when they were wrestling. So, like, he obviously could use his feet. But, yeah, but I was like, the new settings thing on the feature, whatever, it’s not a story, right?
[23:54] Adam: I need, like, what did Ron do? Like, what were the things that happened? Yeah, so this, this is what I think about, right? Is, like, you need a story, and, like, a story is a very simple thing.
[24:14] Adam: It’s that, right? You have a protagonist, he has an objective, and then there’s obstacles. And that’s like, that’s like 90 percent of the thing, right? It’s just like, you find somebody who has those ingredients and sometimes you don’t know, right? You just start talking to them and then they’re like, they tell the story, but that’s what I focus in on.
[24:29] Ronak or Guang: Halfway through the story, I was like, where is Adam going with this? And then I realized, I realized, “Oh, this is an analogy that he’s trying to draw for the for the code email” and then realized “Oh wow that’s actually very spot on. Well played, sir, well played.”
[24:44] Ronak or Guang: How do you go about finding the right guests who have a good story to tell by the way? Like that’s hard because you don’t know a lot of people and don’t know their stories.
[24:51] Adam: Agreed. Yeah, that’s the hardest thing, right? Sometimes I’ll see something and I’ll be like, “Okay, I’ve got to talk to this person.” Sometimes I will just talk to somebody and like, basically I’ll do a pre-interview, I’ll just chat with them and see, you know, what’s going on. “You know, tell me something interesting that happened to you,” kind of explore it.
[25:15] Adam: But yeah, I mean, I think that’s difficult. And the story doesn’t have to be… Like, I did this episode with my friend Don. And he had worked with me at this place Alpertal I was describing with the cafeteria and the stories and whatever.
[25:28] Adam: And like the story was just about how, like, he started at this place as soon as he finished university and, you know, he just felt like they never valued him.
[25:40] Adam: Like, he stayed there for a long time, like, he never worked anywhere else, he never got the contacts for, like, “Oh, maybe this isn’t a great place to work,” and like, I guess his story was like, “You should value yourself because I went through this thing. Like I was working so hard for this place and then I found out like I wasn’t being paid well and there weren’t good working conditions” and whatever.
[25:53] Adam: So I mean, there doesn’t have to be a guy with a wheelchair and a guy with a crutch. It’s more like it’s through the eyes of the person you’re talking to, right? I guess is a way to think about it.
[26:06] Ronak or Guang: You mentioned pre interviews, like is this, do you do that commonly? And if so, then what, what does your pitch look like to the person you’re reaching out to?
[26:13] Adam: Yeah. I just email them and say, “Hey, I think you could be an interesting guest for my podcast. Do you want to have a chat about it?” And then I send them like a Calendly link.
[26:25] Adam: And I think sometimes that, it can be valuable for them too because they get to ask me questions. I think they just get to meet me. Right? So it’s not like a blind date. It’s like, “Oh, we’ve, we’ve chatted before.”
[26:38] Ronak or Guang: Yeah. Do many people take you up on that or is it only a few?
[26:45] Adam: I always talk to everybody first before I interview them.
[26:45] Ronak or Guang: Yeah. I didn’t always but yeah, it’s super helpful.
[26:55] Adam: I took some classes from the Independent Association of Radio Journalists, I think it was called, anyways NPR type folk. And they were super valuable. But like one thing that proper journalists do is audition people.
[27:04] Adam: Like they’ll audition people all the time and like, you know, something happened, like, okay, the big security thing that just happened. What was the company again? Crowdstrike, right?
[27:12] Adam: So you’re writing an article about CrowdStrike and like, you’d need a quote from like an expert or whatever. Right? Like a lot of times journalists will, will talk to like seven experts, right? Like whoever they can get ahold of quickly and they’re just looking for whoever’s the interesting person.
[27:24] Adam: And like, that will be the quote that they use. Right. So basically they’re auditioning people, like, who’s going to say something that’s, you know, poignant and gets my point across.
[27:36] Adam: So yeah. It’s for radio, they would call that like a pre interview. If it’s like a TV show, right? Like often they have producers who this is all they do is like, try to reach out and find like, “Okay, we need somebody to fill in this little segment, right? Like, who do we got? And like, are they interesting?”
[27:50] Ronak or Guang: I see. What are some traits you look out for during those interviews to see if they’re, what do you call them? “You wouldn’t really crazy, you wouldn’t believe it” story.
[28:03] Adam: Yeah, so I think there’s just two criteria. One is that they have, yeah, some sort of story where they have, they had an objective and like, they’re, they’re willing to, to share that. So that’s like, “Has a story.”
[28:22] Adam: And the other one is like, is a talker, to, to use just, that’s my generic term for somebody who’s just like interesting to hear talk.
[28:29] Ronak or Guang: I see. Uh, what questions do you ask to get these responses from them? Like, “Do you have a story?” Is that the question? I’m assuming something else.
[28:41] Adam: So the talker thing, I think you’ll know, let’s look, I have a, I have a checklist here. Please stand by.
[28:46] Ronak or Guang: Nice. I’m a big fan of checklists.
[28:57] Adam: So I have, “When was a time when you thought things were really bad?” Usually there’s like something else attached to that, right? Like, “When in your experience at LinkedIn, were you like, ‘Oh, we’re screwed now,’ you know, and we’ll say like, ‘Oh, you know, yeah.’” And like, “What was the scariest thing, et cetera,” attach that to something.
[29:14] Adam: Right. So it’s like, “Yeah, tell me about your time about LinkedIn. Like, what was the scariest thing that happened when you were there? You know, what was the time where, you know, you really…” Those are the, those are the only two questions I have in front of me, but yeah, it’s usually like,
[29:29] Ronak or Guang: And how long do you schedule these chats for?
[29:36] Adam: Like 20 minutes.
[29:36] Ronak or Guang: In after the chat, have you have you said no to any guests?
[29:36] Adam: Yeah. I’m not good at saying no though.
[29:42] Ronak or Guang: I would imagine that to be a hard part because you’re reaching, you’re inviting someone to say, “Hey, you could be a good fit. Let’s chat more.” But then you may not like the stories or maybe they don’t have as many as you might think.
[29:48] Ronak or Guang: Yeah. What have you said? If you have said no, I would love to know how did you go about it.
[29:54] Adam: Yeah, I think I’ve just said to people like “I’m not sure if it’s like quite a fit” or, but yeah, I don’t like to do that. Like, but yeah, I mean, that’s the thing that I think the journalists are good at that I’m not, right?
[30:02] Adam: It’s like they’re like, “Oh, I’m gonna talk to six people and only use one of them,” where I feel like I’m using people’s time, so they’re like, there should be some end result.
[30:14] Ronak or Guang: Yeah.
[30:14] Ronak or Guang: In this case, like when you have this pre-chart with them, and you invite them back on the podcast, what does your prep typically look like? And do they know that this is the story that you’ll focus on?
[30:25] Adam: Yeah, I try to let them know, you know, what’s interesting to me. And then sometimes though, during the interview, the directions change just because something more interesting comes up.
[30:44] Adam: I interviewed before this guy who, he created a Google AdWords, I think, or AdSense. We were going to talk about that. So I did the pre interview. We chatted. It sounded pretty interesting. He was like a very early Google employee.
[30:58] Adam: But then when we were talking, I was like, “Well, you know, let’s go back further.” And like, he had worked at the JPL, like the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. And he had, like, been this person who had pushed for them to use LISP, and had gotten LISP, like, on this spacecraft and then, like, had a problem with it, and got, like, had to get a REPL going into this, like, thing that was, like, a hundred thousand miles away in space, like, through satellites.
[31:19] Adam: And he’s, like, I don’t know how Lisp REPL works, but you know, he’s printing out, I assume, a thousand open braces from space. So I was like, I just changed what we talked about, right? Like, we didn’t, I mean, we still talked about the AdSense thing. But I guess that’s the benefit of being able to talk to somebody for two hours and then cut it down to an hour, right?
[31:41] Adam: Like once I had that, I was like, “Okay, maybe this is the story.” That’s really… So in other words, you talk to somebody, you look, you know, what’s an interesting experience, but then when they tell, like, you just pay attention to what’s interesting and keep leaning in on it, right?
[31:56] Ronak or Guang: Maybe once you edit it, it changes as well, right? You’re like, “Oh, the focus should really be X.”
[31:56] Ronak or Guang: Do you edit the podcast yourself or do you outsource?
[32:01] Adam: Yeah, I edited it. It’s a pain.
[32:06] Ronak or Guang: I think it’s super cool that you take so much effort into the editing process and because for us it’s more of a chore, but for you, right, it’s like a creative process, right? Like that’s where you have all the Lego pieces, and then you’re putting together something, you’re creating something.
[32:21] Ronak or Guang: I’m curious, like, what’s your favorite part of the process of making a podcast episode? Because for, for us, I feel like there’s less choices versus for you. I feel like there’s a lot more, that you’re doing a lot more…
[32:32] Adam: What’s my favorite part? The problem is, like, I kept on putting more work into, you know, like polishing the episode. And so sometimes I feel like it takes me so much time that I’m like, “Oh, like, what am I doing?”
[32:45] Adam: But yeah, like at some point somebody told me like, “Oh, you should have music.” And then, so I did put music in like just at the beginning. And then at the end like, I think this person wanted me to like, like score it, like Hans Zimmerman or something.
[32:58] Adam: I was like, “Yeah, I don’t even know how that works,” but It turns out like, like putting the music in is super fun. So that was like just a fun part I enjoyed, right?
[33:05] Adam: I, once again, I took a little class from some sort of like NPR folk. And so instead of just having like, “Oh, we’re going to play our theme song,” right? They would, you know, try to have like a song, you know, like where the kind of like beat drops at the right time to like cut you into the story.
[33:22] Adam: And that is like putting that in. It’s kind of a pain because I’m like, “Oh, I still got to do that,” but it’s super fun.
[33:29] Ronak or Guang: You mentioned a class before as well. Uh, can you talk more about that class you took?
[33:34] Adam: Yeah, I took this class from Christina Shockley and I took two classes from her. I forget what they were called, but she works for NPR, does one of their morning programs, I think, but just like the Michigan version of it, I believe. Anyway, she’s super talented.
[33:50] Adam: Took this class. It was all like journalists and radio people in it, except for me. Which like totally freaked me out. Like there’s a guy from the Economist and I was like, “What am I doing here? Like I just interview people about whatever.”
[34:04] Ronak or Guang: Wait, how did you get in?
[34:11] Adam: Hey, you just like, it’s so there’s this thing called AIR like an association for independent radio journalists so I, you just, you just pay to join, like, and then they have classes and then I paid for the class.
[34:26] Adam: One of the things she had us do in the class was every, so I think we had a class every Sunday for several hours and we did like various things, but she also had us make like a, there was an assignment every week and it was like making a two to five minute like audio…
[34:39] Adam: Which, you know, like, if you’re listening to the radio, sometimes they’ll, like, cut into, like, “Oh, here’s a, whatever, a small story about a man in Newfoundland who’s reunited with his dog” or whatever. It’s, like, a little thing.
[34:52] Adam: But she had us make them, like, about ourselves and, like, reflecting on ourselves, right? So it was, like, a audio piece. Like, it’s almost like an audio essay, I guess, about yourself. But, like, making it very small and, uh, condensed. And then she was giving feedback on it.
[35:06] Adam: And, uh, yeah, so I don’t know, I forget how long the class went, but it was like making these every week and it was pretty fun. It’s like writing like a, you know, a reflective little essay, but instead of for your blog, it’s like, you’re, you’re speaking.
[35:17] Adam: So I learned a lot from that process that like, you can make something interesting in audio by just like reflecting on something that’s going on in your life.
[35:26] Ronak or Guang: I’m very curious about like the conviction aspect of like, getting enough like conviction that like, “Hey, this is something I want to really get good at, right? Like I want to invest in learning all these new skills,” right? Skills that are core to like producing like this great piece.
[35:43] Ronak or Guang: But before that, I’m curious about like were there any engineering practices that you thought that were pretty helpful in kind of systematizing this?
[35:52] Adam: I have checklists for the process of going through. Um, so we’ve kind of built them up over time and then I tried to write down things that don’t go well. Um, and I keep a list of that.
[36:07] Adam: And so it’s just like some process was a pain or I forgot to do this thing. Um, and then I try to go back and try to knock some of off.
[36:15] Adam: So that’s like my, I guess, like, refinement step, right? And so if I write them down a couple times on this list, like, “Oh, this didn’t go well, this didn’t go well.” Then you know, I can go back because oftentimes it’s like, “Okay, yeah, it was a pain to do this, but like, I got to get the episode out. Like, I don’t care that it’s, that’s a pain. I need to do it.” But then afterwards I’ll have it on the list.
[36:36] Adam: Like, “Oh yeah. That stupid…” Um, What’s an example of that? Was hoping,
[36:42] Ronak or Guang: What’s an example?
[36:42] Adam: Let me look.
[36:50] Ronak or Guang: Mention of Fibonacci and story points going back to our last…
[36:56] Adam: I was getting transcripts done of the podcast. Um, but then I switched to, to using I guess the Open AI transcribing… Whisper. Yeah, but it’s like, like I ran into all kinds of problems with it. And so I had to feed it a glossary and then had to tweak things on it.
[37:13] Adam: So like one time, like I have written down here. I wrote this thing like “Glossary generator,” right? And so it takes the Whisper transcription, feeds it to like ChatGPT Four and there’s probably some mistakes in it. Like, “Can you make a list of the words that it got wrong?” Right. And then I feed that back again.
[37:32] Adam: So that was like, just something I added. Cause I was like, “Okay, this is wrong.” And then I’m like, “Okay, now it’s, I have this list and I’m feeding it back and then it gets…”
[37:39] Ronak or Guang: Yeah. Nice.
[37:46] Ronak or Guang: You mentioned you learned a lot from that class. What are some of the pieces you learned that would involve telling a good story?
[37:56] Adam: The thing I learned from Christina, there’s a lot in your, in your voice, like a lot of emotion and power. And if I am telling a story to my wife or something. Even just like I was reading this book and it had this crazy story in it was like a nonfiction book. And I’m like animated and telling her all this, right?
[38:14] Adam: But then I would, you know, want to introduce the story for my podcast and I would be talking just into the void. I’m like recording the intro and there’s nobody there and I just don’t sound like a person. I just sound so bored, right? Like I don’t sound excited.
[38:29] Ronak or Guang: Relatable, yup.
[38:34] Adam: And so, like, that, that’s hard. Like, I still struggle with that, but like, that was the thing where she was like, “Yeah. This isn’t good.” Like, you know, there’s all these radio people in the class.
[38:47] Adam: And then I remember because she had me, like, I was in this room and we were all in this big zoom meeting, whatever, I have to like practice. So I’m like reading the intro and she’s like, “Okay, try again.” But she’s like, “Leave, like get out of the room.”
[38:56] Adam: “And then I want you to like run in as fast as you can. And then like stop and give your intro.” Right. And then I did that. And she’s like, “See, it’s getting better.”
[39:07] Adam: And it was like, she was like, she made me just like physically move a lot. The idea was like to try to get some of that humanness of like how I would normally talk. It’s like, for whatever reason, like a switch would flip in my head and I’d be like, “Time to read the introduction to my podcast,” you know?
[39:24] Ronak or Guang: Yeah.
[39:29] Ronak or Guang: How did you come across this class, by the way?
[39:40] Adam: Like, I think I found a link to this. Uh, the it’s like association, association of independent audio producers.
[39:46] Adam: Yeah, they have a class. So, yeah. So I joined them and then they send out emails and they’re like, “Hey, here’s a class.” And I was like, “I should sign up for this.”
[39:52] Adam: And then I was very nervous about it because I don’t feel like I should be part of the Independent Association of Audio Producers. But yeah, it was fine.
[40:05] Ronak or Guang: Nice.
[40:05] Ronak or Guang: So you mentioned you took another class within NPR as well, which was more about like, where can you add certain soundbites, not soundbites, but rather what is the right word? Audio pieces to emphasize what the person is saying. What, what was that about?
[40:18] Adam: It was about that. But like, weird to add…
[40:24] Ronak or Guang: What did you learn as part of that class?
[40:35] Adam: Yeah, like, so if you were to listen um, I guess like Serial was like a really big breakthrough podcast back in the day. And like it was like scored, like it had like music and the music kind of gave it momentum and, you know, kept it moving and made it interesting.
[40:50] Adam: And that was created by the people who made This American Life, and if you listen to This American Life, right, it’s like a bunch of 15-minute versions of that, and they use music. Sometimes it’s too much, and I don’t like it, but sometimes it really adds a lot to the episode.
[41:05] Adam: And so, yeah. I took a class where they talked about how that’s done. And, you know, there’s podcasts that are like full dramas with like people acting out of fiction with, with sound effects. But I just learned the, the very basics and, uh, yeah, I found it very powerful.
[41:24] Adam: And the thing that I learned was like, I, if I took like a, so I paid for a non, like a royalty free music service and I found like, if I found like a rock song and I drop out all the instruments, except just the… And then I can use kind of like a gritty bass.
[41:39] Adam: And then when you know, just like a repetitive bass chord when I’m introducing things and then I drop out like that and you cut the bass and then the story starts and people are like, you know, it gives them an audio cue that like, “Oh, something’s changed here.”
[41:48] Adam: Right. That was Adam talking, but now like, boom, now we’re in the… Pretty cool. Pretty cool.
[41:54] Ronak or Guang: How did you get this conviction, to, you know, put in all this investment in terms of like learning new skills? I imagine, yeah, it must’ve been pretty, you know, daunting to be in that room with the, with the people from the Economist to be like, “Oh.”
[42:20] Adam: So I read this book, called Ultra Learning and it’s by Scott Young, I believe. Super good book. Ultra Learning, master hard skills, outsmart the competition, accelerate your career. It’s quite a subtitle,
[42:32] Adam: So the book, Scott Young was this guy who he finished business school and decided, “Why didn’t I go into computer science? Like I like computers, right? I like programming.”
[42:43] Adam: And so he embarked, you know, this was, I don’t know, 20 years ago, but it was right when the MIT like open courseware came out. So he embarked on this project, like “I’m going to do the whole MIT undergrad. But I’m going to hit it like full time as a job, and I should be able to do the courses, like do a triple course load and pass through all these classes.”
[43:09] Adam: And he, he did do that. I mean, you don’t get a degree for just doing all the online MIT things, but he had somebody grade him like he got tests and whatever. And then he, I don’t know, he did this a bunch of times.
[43:18] Adam: Anyways, he wrote a book about this. He called it like ultra learning. And I read it around the time that I transitioned to the storytelling stuff. And, uh, I guess the, the point of the book was like, “Hey, if you like really hit something hard, um, in a short period of time, you can make a lot of progress.”
[43:36] Adam: Right? Other examples in the book included like people who, you know, develop a level of language proficiency really quickly. Um, and how they, they just invest a lot of effort and surpass somebody who spends 10 years on Duolingo. You know, they get there in three months, but just by like hammering it.
[43:50] Adam: So I think that that’s true, right? So what do you want to throw yourself at, right? So I chose to throw myself at the podcast. There’s people now, you know, I mean, you mentioned data science, right? It’s like, sometimes if you encounter something new and you’re excited about it, you can just really invest a lot of time and level up pretty quickly.
[44:14] Ronak or Guang: Nice. Taking a step back, right, like you’re doing this all like well having a full time job. How did you balance this like? Did you treat this as just like kind of like a hobby? That you like do on the side or how did you manage?
[44:26] Adam: I mean, so it started off when I wasn’t putting much into it, then it wasn’t too hard like before I really started focusing on “Oh, let’s make the best episode I can,” then it wasn’t that challenging because it didn’t take up that much time.
[44:40] Adam: At some point I started waking up at five o’clock and so I would work for two hours, like from 5:15 to, yeah, like 7:15. Then I would get ready for my day and then I would work. I would just do two hours of podcast work before I worked each day.
[45:00] Adam: And like, sometimes I wasn’t super, it probably wasn’t my best hours for working. But cumulatively, there’s actually a lot of hours there. So, so that worked very well.
[45:11] Adam: So it was just like putting in the time. I stopped, I moved the time from five to six. Because like eventually, I did it, like, I think after like two years of that, like, I was just like, that’s like kind of sleep deprived or I don’t know.
[45:28] Adam: Like it ended up, I ended up switching it because my wife was just like, “Why are you an asshole all the time?” She didn’t actually say that, but it was like, I, I felt like I was, I was wearing a little bit, my social niceties. But yeah, so that was a big way. I just, I just spent two hours on it each morning.
[45:46] Ronak or Guang: That’s a big commitment, to be honest.
[45:53] Ronak or Guang: Yeah. I mean, I struggle with this all the time. Wow.
[46:02] Ronak or Guang: Podcast that you can, how do you go about like goal setting, I guess, I don’t know.
[46:10] Adam: Yeah. You know, I’ve been thinking about this thing, like, like goal drift, start with a specific goal, you know, doing the podcast because I want to learn about more technical stuff or I want to ask person question who I read their book and then like, you know, it gets some attention. And then you’re excited about it.
[46:18] Adam: And then it’s like, “Well, maybe I’m going to be Joe Rogan with hair.” Like I don’t know. Like that, maybe that’s my next stop. Right. Uh, damn.
[46:33] Ronak or Guang: Nice, nice. What, I guess, what’s your, like, current goal, if you have one?
[46:41] Adam: So my, my current goal, it kind of relates to something you were asking. Which is, yeah, if somebody has this big crazy story, like that guy who did Lisp in space, like that’s amazing. Right. But like, what about like people’s everyday lives?
[46:55] Adam: Like how can that be interesting and how can people learn from that? Because I think like, well, first of all, there’s a limit of people deploying Lisp into space, but like, also, there’s so much to learn from, you know, just like everyday stuff that happens to people, but how do you, you know, make that entertaining?
[47:07] Adam: So I think that’s like a big challenge for me, right? It’s like, you can write the science fiction book where like the world is on the line, and if you don’t save things, the earth is going to explode, right? But like, can you write the, the story where it’s like very compelling, but it’s about like something much smaller, right? Like somebody raising their kid or whatever. That’s a metaphor.
[47:30] Adam: I’m not working on either of those things, but like I was talking to somebody recently, about something I was working on at work and how I was given, this ticket to work on this area. I wasn’t familiar with. And like, I thought I knew how to solve it and I was working on solving it.
[47:43] Adam: In turn it, I was wrong. I didn’t understand what I was doing, but it was like three days later when I figured out I didn’t like, I was doing it wrong. Right. And like, I was new to this, so there was expectation like I could get feedback and help, but also it had been three days. And so I was like, “It’s too late to like reach out and ask for help.”
[48:04] Adam: Cause they’re going to be like, “Well, what the hell have you been doing?” Right. And so I was explaining this to somebody and I thought it was like a very much my weird headspace. Right. That I was going over this, my head, like, “Oh my God, it’s too late to ask for help.”
[48:17] Adam: And this person was like, “Oh my God, Like I think about that all the time. Like it’s too late to ask for help. Like I’m stuck by that.” And then that made me think, like, there’s all these things, the small things of everyday work world.
[48:28] Adam: And like, how do you make those interesting and compelling stories? So that’s something I’m thinking about. I don’t know that I have an answer, but yeah.
[48:42] Ronak or Guang: I guess the, obviously if it’s crazy, it has its own appeal, but then, you know, the further away you get from crazy, like the more normal it is, like more relatable it is, right? So there’s much more of the emphasis on how well the storytelling is versus just like, sort of, you dump the facts in terms of, “Oh yeah, this was outlandish.”
[48:55] Adam: Yeah. But like, how do you make it interesting? Right. Like, cause like our days can be boring. Right. But like, where’s the pieces where that’s not boring.
[49:09] Adam: Right. And I think it has a lot to do with vulnerability, right? Like if you’re able to share the things that you are struggling with.
[49:14] Adam: Like internally, like that can be a lot. There can be something interesting there. Like, even though this ticket that there was a problem for me, it was super minor and boring. And if I described it to you, like you wouldn’t care.
[49:27] Adam: But the fact that it, it like got me worked up and I was worried, you know, that they’re going to think I’m dumb. And like, “How did I think that this way would work? And like, I have to hide it. Like, how am I going to catch up so they don’t know I went down this?”
[49:41] Adam: Yeah. That’s where it gets interesting to me.
[49:41] Ronak or Guang: Nice. Nice. So speaking of storytelling, so DevRel, developers relations, there’s also, I imagine a ton of, uh, storytelling there. Like, how did you first get into it? I guess, from the management story now, fast forward, like a little bit.
[50:01] Adam: Sorry. I don’t know, yeah, I mean, uh, like I had the podcast and so somebody reached out to me about a developer relations role. And I was like, “Yeah, I like, you know, communicating to developers. Let’s give it a try.”
[50:14] Adam: And, yeah, I didn’t know what I was doing and the person who hired me had never, they didn’t know what developer relations, I mean, I guess we all had ideas, right? But so I started thinking that, like, I would go give a lot of talks at conferences and then, you know, we tried to do meetups and, I wrote, like, tutorials talking about our product and we didn’t see a lot of success.
[50:35] Adam: But then we reached out to, uh, this guy, Mitch Weiner. He’s one of the founders of DigitalOcean. And, uh, he said, like, “Well, you just need to understand the people who might be the customers of your product, like these developers, like what problems they have, and then like, just solve those problems, like write down the solutions.”
[50:59] Adam: And we were like, “Okay, and then what?” And he’s like, “That’s the whole thing. Like, that’s, it’s like, people didn’t know how to install MySQL onto a Linux server. We wrote that down. We put it like on the DigitalOcean website. And we didn’t say like, check out DigitalOcean.”
[51:17] Adam: “I mean, maybe. But like, we just told them how to solve their problem, and like, it happens to be, obviously those people, you know, might be interested in getting a virtual private server from DigitalOcean, right?”
[51:30] Adam: So that’s how, I got my start, and we just tried to help people with their problems, right? One of the big first things I wrote that the people really, remember me by was this article about jq. jq parses json, super cool, idiosyncratic tool, I guess, right?
[51:47] Adam: Like, and so I just wrote a tutorial for how it works, because if you understood kind of the logic behind it, like it made sense. It’s like its own little JQ world. You can, it’s actually Turing complete. You could build whatever you want inside of it.
[52:01] Adam: I think it was on Hacker News recently, somebody built JQ inside of JQ, like using the Turing completeness, right? But I just spent a lot of time writing down, um, you know, like, here’s how you use it and explaining things to people. Um, and then that did very well.
[52:18] Adam: And, you know, it showed up on Hacker News. People were on our website, they learned about our product. And, uh, that was like how I started to, yeah, to, to learn these skills. So, I mean, I guess that’s not really storytelling. It’s more understanding, developers and what problems they have.
[52:36] Ronak or Guang: So one follow up on that, like when it comes to developer relations, you see many people in this role from different companies and they all do it very differently, um, kind of going by what you said earlier.
[52:45] Ronak or Guang: In many cases you see some people building kind of a tutorial, working tutorial of sorts and they would publish it on GitHub. It’s like here’s how you can use tool X to achieve Y, uh, which is basically a way to show how you can use one of their products to solve your problems. In some cases it’s tutorials like a blog post and other cases like a conference talk, for example.
[53:01] Ronak or Guang: What are the parts which are not visible outside, uh, two people, uh, which is sometimes talking to customers, for example, to understand what their problems are. So if I just look at the words like developer and relationships, uh, what are the aspects here, which are not public facing, which happens behind the scenes?
[53:28] Adam: Yeah. I mean, that would be one of them for sure. Like talking to people, using the product, seeing what problems they have, uh, maybe paying attention to where people are just talking about your products or competitors or whatever, seeing what issues they have.
[53:43] Adam: One of the problems is like developer relations is a weird role, means a lot of different things, um, to different, depending on the organization, right? I mean, I guess that’s true of any role, right?
[53:52] Adam: But like some people, is communicating feedback that, you know, users of the product are getting to the product team, right? So it can, it can look a little bit like a PM role or something, right? Where, you know, developers are using this API, they’re having this issue, like, how can we prioritize this?
[54:07] Adam: So I worked at Earthly, it was like a seed stage startup. And, like our big problem, you know, was we were competing obscurity, right? Like nobody knew we existed.
[54:23] Adam: If you worked in developer relations for Amazon on AWS, Lambda, like everybody knows it exists, right? So then it’s a different type of problem, right? You don’t need to let people know that Lambda is a thing.
[54:36] Ronak or Guang: Yeah. Maybe it’s much more relevant to provide tutorials that show how to use the latest feature. Or yeah, that part where you’re feeding feedback back to the product team.
[54:45] Adam: So it varies a lot. But yeah, I guess I did a lot of like awareness stuff. Right. And that’s where that digital ocean perspective really made sense. Because if you go, like I went to a meetup to talk about Earthly. It was like an online meetup.
[55:00] Adam: And, uh, like there was the guy who Ronak or Guanged it and there was one other person. And then I gave some presentation. And, then at the end, I was like, “Any questions?” And the, the one person who wasn’t like the Ronak or Guang was like, “So this is a command line tool.” I was like, “Yeah, no, it’s, it is a command line tool.”
[55:25] Adam: And then, but the thing is, because who wants a meetup where various dev tool startups come and show what they’ve built, right? Nobody does. Right. So I think Mitch Weiner’s point was like, what problems actually people have and you don’t need to sell them on your product. Just help them. You know, solve their problems and, often it’s tangentially related, right?
[55:49] Adam: Like I remember, Earthly, for example, really good at doing builds for monorepos, which can be a challenge. And so we wrote like lots of stuff about like, here’s how you can build monorepos, right? Not just, here’s how you do it with our tool.
[56:00] Adam: Like, here’s how you structure it. Here’s best practices. It’s like educating people. Um, those people, you know, we think they would really benefit from using our product, but, just putting that out there, they’re aware of us and they know, you know, maybe when they’re like, “Hey, what build tool should I use?” They might check it out.
[56:21] Ronak or Guang: So in a way, talking about goal drifting at the beginning of the podcast, like you mentioned, your goal was to be this amazing programmer who knows how to solve all these problems in the code, um, on the developer relationship side, I would say it’s slightly different where it’s little more breadth than depth.
[56:37] Ronak or Guang: Maybe I’m getting that wrong, but if that’s the case, like in a way that goal has drifted, considering that, do you want to stay on the dev rel path or would you consider changing it? Like you think “I’ve drifted from my technical roots,” I guess.
[56:56] Ronak or Guang: Yeah. I’m curious about that as well, cuz like when you said that right like I was like “Oh like kind of being like an engineer’s engineer, right? Like, being really like, drilled down, is that still, important to you? Like, do you still want to be that?
[57:09] Ronak or Guang: Or, after all this experience, you’re kind of like, you know what? Maybe that was kind of a pseudo goal, or, part of the journey that got me to where I am.”
[57:14] Adam: Ooh, that sounded pretty good. Sorry, sorry, sorry.
[57:19] Adam: I don’t know why I wanted to be the best engineer. Like, I don’t, I don’t know. It’s just, I wanted to, but like, there’s all these people that I looked up to in that time, right? I’m trying to think of specific people like Joel Spolsky, I remember he had this blog talking about engineering like back in the day. It was the guy from Steve Yegge or whatever.
[57:37] Adam: I don’t know there was all these people and I was like, “You know, I want to know all the things that they know. Like I want to be that great.” But like, if you think about it, the reason we know about them is because actually they’re communicators, right? They’re explaining problems to us.
[57:55] Adam: Like, I thought this guy has a blog because he’s the most amazing engineer. But no, he, he, I know about the things that he’s done because he talks about them, right? Like what he’s actually good at, like all these people I looked up to, what they’re actually good at was communicating, right?
[58:16] Adam: The person who wrote the book that I wanted to ask questions about how to do, you know, whatever functional programming, like, it’s not clear they were the best functional programmer in the world. Hopefully they were decent at it, but no, they had written a book, right? They had spent a lot of time communicating.
[58:33] Adam: So I think that actually, like, I, I maybe realized that my goal, you know, was misplaced, that there was a larger goal or something that, yeah, I wasn’t seeing that all these people who communicate are the people that I look up to, right.
[58:44] Adam: And it’s, it can be super impactful if you can take something and explain it in a way that, that lets it crystallize in people’s minds. And I don’t know that I’m the best at it, but like, uh, it’s, it feels very valuable and important.
[59:07] Adam: Yeah. And so that’s what I’m going for, right? And like, it’s weird because developer relations, it feels like it’s a good racket because I like communicating to developers, right? And if I can find a place where they value those skills and it can help impactfully, you know, grow their business or whatever.
[59:23] Adam: And also I get to like, write about why we should stop using YAML, like for everything or whatever my perspective is. Like it feels like a super good, it feels like it shouldn’t be something I’m paid for, but, but it seems like people are willing to pay.
[59:44] Ronak or Guang: “Oh, why we shouldn’t use YAMLs for everything?” Well, there’s the number, Hacker News Number 1 post.
[59:50] Adam: True, that, yeah.
[1:00:00] Ronak or Guang: And that’s actually quite profound that I need to think more…
[1:00:08] Adam: Yeah. If you, if you think of all the people you look up to, right. Like, I was looking up to them, cause I thought they were the best, but, but like, I would never have known about them if they didn’t invest time into, into communicating.
[1:00:15] Adam: Right. Like, I remember reading all these Carl Sagan books when I was a kid. I love them. Um, you know, like, “Oh, Carl Sagan. He’s the most amazing scientist in the world.” Although he was an amazing science writer, right? Like, I think he was a good scientist. But that’s not why I know of him.
[1:00:32] Adam: I know of him because he was a science writer. Communication is everything, right? The people telling stories about the builds breaking at Operatel. The person I learned the most from, I think he was just really good at telling these stories, right?
[1:00:44] Adam: You know, like somebody would be like, “Oh, yeah, I got called in on the weekend, like, turned out the disk was full.” But Richard, that’s not how he would tell the story, right? Like, he would give you breadcrumbs, he’s like, “Get this call, I’m laying on my couch, I’m watching Lost, and I’m like, I need to drive in,” you know.
[1:00:58] Adam: And he would like, they’re like, “Oh, Richard’s got another good one. Oh, was it this? Was it that? Was, did the router power out again?” And it’s like, I learned a lot from Richard, but only because he let you kind of live that debugging experience.
[1:01:14] Adam: Yes. Right? Like you got the vicarious learning of that battle. That’s just because he was a good storyteller.
[1:01:21] Ronak or Guang: True, very true. Nice. I love it.
[1:01:27] Ronak or Guang: I think we’ve had a great time talking to you. Thank you so much for sharing your journey as well as all of your experiences, with software engineering, podcasting, and developer relationships, and most of all, communication.
[1:01:42] Ronak or Guang: Thank you so much for joining us today. This was really amazing for us. Hope it was entertaining for you.
[1:01:48] Adam: Thank you so much I had fun, I hope it was everything you bargained for. Next time.
[1:01:53] Ronak or Guang: Awesome, thanks Adam.
[1:02:02] Ronak or Guang: Hey, thank you so much for listening to the show. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and learn more about us at SoftwareMisadventures.com. You can also write to us at Hello@SoftwareMisadventures.com. We would love to hear from you. Until next time, take care.